


No More Coal

by raiining



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Christmas, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fix-It, Gen, Happy Tower Time AU, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-19
Updated: 2012-12-19
Packaged: 2017-11-21 13:56:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/598508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raiining/pseuds/raiining
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony’s made stupid mistakes before, but this one has consequences.  Things get better, but it takes time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No More Coal

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tamnation](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tamnation/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Coal](https://archiveofourown.org/works/594214) by [tamnation](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tamnation/pseuds/tamnation). 



> I read this story and _loved it_ but felt the intense need to fix it all better. This what my brain came up with at one am (because I couldn’t sleep with Clint left hurting – yes, I’m aware that means I have problems. I’m okay with that ;)
> 
>  
> 
> Beta'd by the ever-fantastic Ralkana! All mistakes left are mine :)

Tony finished the EMP arrows in record time. Clint accepted them with a smile, but that didn’t magically make things better.

Tony had known it wouldn’t. He had screwed up enough times in his life that he realized simple gifts didn’t change things when you fucked up. The problem was, he wasn’t sure _how_ to make things better.

Clint was still being standoffish with the team. Tony hadn’t realized how much the archer had let them in with his crazy Christmas shenanigans, but he’d learned that by the afternoon of the 25th. He’d figured things would be at least a little better by the 26th, but something in the way Clint interacted with the team had shifted.

He was still sarcastic, kind of an asshole, and a bit of a freak – and he still saved their asses on a daily basis. He didn’t stop chatting on the comms or flipping Tony off when he spoke without thinking. But he was quieter after the missions, and he didn’t cook in the kitchen much anymore. He spent more of his downtime on his private floor with Phil.

At first Tony figured he was the one getting snubbed, and he decided he deserved it. He removed himself from the group for a while – it wasn’t hard, he had a lot of work to do and genius wasn’t going to build itself – but it didn’t help. Steve staged an intervention with Bruce, Thor, and Natasha to confront Tony’s sequestration. Steve called it “hiding” and Tony protested until the team confessed that they understood.

They had all felt it, they informed him sadly. Bruce and Clint still cooked together, but Clint had stopped volunteering new recipes to try. Thor told them that the archer was suddenly busy whenever Thor wanted to go out and explore the sights of Manhattan. Steve and Clint had never been close, so there wasn’t one thing he could point to, but Clint smiled less at the supersoldier, and they didn’t talk baseball, anymore.

Everyone looked to Natasha, who scowled and said that Clint held back now when they sparred. He had never done that before.

They talked it over for a while and decided as a group to give him some space. They had messed up, and Clint had decided to punish them – they would respect this distance as his choice. Six weeks later they realized Clint had used the space they’d given him and run with it, and they scrambled to make up the distance he’d taken.

Eventually, they did. It took time, effort, and a helluva lot of patience – a lot more than it had taken the first time around – but they did it. Clint slowly came out of his shell.

Phil was harder. He hadn’t done much with the team – they hadn’t had long enough after his medical release – but he was more closed off than he had been before Christmas. Tony hadn’t realized how comfortable around them their Agent had become, until he wasn’t anymore.

It was hardest on Steve. Phil stopped giving him extra “Captain America” smiles and just treated him like the rest of the team. Tony could see that Steve didn’t want to let it bother him, but it did.

They had a second meeting as a group but couldn’t figure a way to make things better with their handler. They decided to focus on Clint, since that was how they had messed things up to begin with. 

It helped, mostly. Things went back to almost normal – aliens attacked and supervillains tried to take over the world and the Avengers stopped them, every time. They had movie nights and pizza dinners and Clint went back to cooking occasionally for the team. He smiled more, hesitated less, and Phil carefully watched it all from a distance. It took more time than they had assumed it would, but their handler unbent a little too, one day at a time.

Tony had thought they were doing pretty good, then, by the time Easter rolled around. He hadn’t even realized it _was_ Easter, but Happy had a pair of bunny ears on that morning and that was pretty much Tony’s alarm clock about the season. 

He got back to the Tower after his lunch-date with Pepper and found Clint in the kitchen fixing a sandwich. He remembered how excited Clint had been at Christmas and felt the giddiness of a sudden brainwave – if Clint never had a real Christmas with a real family, then he probably hadn’t had an Easter either, right?

Tony hadn’t either, but that was beside the point.

“So I hear it’s Easter or whatever,” Tony said, bouncing into the kitchen with a spring in his step. “What do you say we do an egg hunt or something? I bet JARVIS can help us find the best corners.”

Clint looked up from his sandwich and smiled at him, but it was an Agent Barton Special Smile – wide grin, dimpled cheeks, and absolutely no reflection at all in his eyes. “That’s a good idea, Tony, you should totally go for it. I’m good, though – Phil and I already had an egg hunt this morning.”

Now that he was looking, Tony could see the chocolate eggs in Clint’s pockets and the silver of a shiny wrapper sticking out from his coat. “Oh,” he said, feeling himself deflate a little. He summoned a leer. “Is that what they’re calling it nowadays?” 

Clint rolled his eyes and flipped him off before wandering away with his sandwich. Tony stayed in the kitchen for a moment and debated asking the rest of the team if they wanted to do an egg hunt, but he knew without Clint it wouldn’t be much fun. 

The thing was, their team was kind of unenthusiastic about holidays. Tony didn’t have any kind of basis for comparison, and he got that Bruce and Natasha didn’t either. Thor had similar Asgardian celebrations, but they always seemed to involve gutting an animal of some sort, and Tony really wasn’t into that. 

Clint didn’t have any experience in this sort of thing, either, but he cared about it in a way that made it okay for everyone else to get into the spirit of things, too. Except Clint didn’t want to celebrate with the group anymore, and Coulson was apparently okay with that, if he was setting up private celebrations in their rooms.

Which meant Phil no longer trusted them with Clint, not with the things that mattered. That hurt, but it wasn’t like Tony didn’t know they deserved it.

So Tony left the kitchen and buried himself in his workshop again. They threw a party for Thor on the summer solstice and had a feast on September 21st for something called “Mabon” – or whatever the Norse equivalent that Tony couldn’t pronounce was, but JARVIS assured him it was an autumn harvest celebration, so Mabon it was. But Halloween passed quietly, with Bruce carving a lonely pumpkin in the kitchen while Clint and Coulson laughed on their way to the elevator dressed in matching pirate outfits. Steve was the only one who dared to ask where they were going, and Phil calmly informed them it was a “Halloween party, not a S.H.I.E.L.D. thing – don’t worry about it, Captain”. 

Thanksgiving was a little better, because they had practice after all of the feasting that Thor had insisted on, and Clint said he would help Bruce cook. So they were all together, at least, and even had turkey sandwiches the next day before Dr. Doom decided to attack. 

Soon enough Christmas was rolling around the corner again, though, and the difference from last year was palpable. Clint didn’t insist on holiday movies, and he only made a few batches of cookies for the team. He didn’t swing down from the rafters and steal anyone’s hot cocoa. Last year Clint had helped decorate the tree with home-made ornaments that – okay – Tony might have been a little premature in calling tacky. Without them the tree looked bare, and too much like the Christmas trees of his childhood – pretty, but empty of feeling.

When he asked Clint about it, in as much of an offhanded manner as he could, the archer just shrugged and said, “Phil and I have our own tree upstairs. It’s cool.”

It wasn’t, but Tony didn’t know how to say that. 

The situation came to a bit of a head with the stockings, though. Last year they had all hung their stockings up by the fire, each of their names hanging in a row, and this year Clint and Phil’s were noticeably absent. 

“I’m keeping Hawkeye’s stocking upstairs,” Phil informed him when Tony asked. The frosty cool that they had mostly worked out of his voice was back again. “I don’t want a repeat of last year.”

“We wouldn’t – ” Tony tried, but Coulson shook his head. 

“It doesn’t matter,” he said and turned away. 

They had another group meeting in Tony’s workshop late Christmas Eve and decided to go ahead and get Clint another stocking anyway. They filled it up in secret and hung it beside the rest of the team’s the morning of Christmas, and they got one for Phil, too. 

By mutual accord, everyone waited for their remaining teammates before opening their stockings. It took a while – Clint and Phil were obviously having a good time in their rooms, because it was past eleven before they finally came down. They found the team sitting in the living room drinking eggnog and eating gingerbread, and came to an uncertain stop when they saw the still-wrapped presents and unopened stockings.

“Um, you guys didn’t have to wait for us,” Clint said, fiddling nervously with his fingers. Tony shrugged for the group, because this was still his fault and he was fixing it. 

“We wanted to,” he said. “Come on and sit down so we can all get started. Cookie?” 

Clint took the cookie and sat down by Natasha, who was obviously trying to keep herself from expressing her satisfaction at that, and just as obviously failing. He blinked when Steve passed over his stocking with a smile. 

“Phil told you we were doing our own presents upstairs,” Clint said hesitantly, before taking it.

“The fireplace looked empty,” Bruce told him with a gentle expression. He passed Phil his own stocking. “And Tony said something about never having enough presents. Go ahead, open up.”

Clint glanced at Phil, who nodded, before digging into his stocking. They had each paid more attention to Clint this year, and knew what little things he liked. Natasha had gotten him a PEZ dispenser and Tony included arrowheads of every different shape and size. Steve had drawn a picture of him and Phil on a piece of parchment and rolled it into the stocking, and Bruce had found some rare spices you couldn’t buy off the grocery shelf. Thor was still pretty bad at Christmas presents, but he had gotten Clint a novelty t-shirt and wrapped it as best he could. 

Clint’s smile grew as he unwrapped every present, and he dug happily into the candy while the rest of the team emptied their stockings. After that came presents proper, and then the Christmas breakfast that had become a lunch, since by that point it was after two. 

They spent the afternoon watching movies again, and it was good – it was much better than last year. New Years went off without a hitch and January rolled around just fine.

The subtle air of tension that had been lingering over the team lifted, and everyone smiled more. Tony spent less time in his workshop and Bruce spent less time by himself in the kitchen. Phil and Steve started having real conversations again, and Natasha left her sparring sessions with Clint looking distinctly pleased. 

The team felt whole again, something they hadn’t realized had been missing since their first November together. It felt good.

At Easter, Clint hesitantly asked if anyone wanted to participate in his and Phil’s now-annual egg hunt, and went on to tie with Tony on the number of chocolate eggs found. Clint said that was because JARVIS cheated and Natasha stopped to eat each of her eggs as she found them – so no one else could steal any, she claimed. They had another feast for Thor on the summer solstice, but this time Clint cooked. A giant robot from outer space attacked New York on Mabon, but they all dressed up that year for Halloween. Thanksgiving was interrupted by the giant robot’s evil creator – Tony wished he was making this stuff up – but they finished their feast after the battle, and still had enough turkey left to make sandwiches the day after. 

By the time Christmas rolled around again there was no more talk of separate stockings. Clint and Phil were still delayed in joining the group, and Tony knew they had decorated their own tree in their rooms again this year. He suspected Coulson had filled a separate stocking for Clint to open up in bed, but he didn’t want to invade their privacy by asking JARVIS. Besides, Clint had shown Tony how to string popcorn into garlands last week, and Steve had helped loop them around the tree.

Tony still regretted the stupid prank he had pulled two years ago, but he had done a lot of other stupid things since then, and so far everyone kept forgiving him. That was a lot, he reflected as he sat around the tree after presents, looking at his team.

That was family.


End file.
